Counter-arguments have been advanced by other scholars. In a review, Hall
(2007:149–150) agrees that Hobson presents ‘an exceptionally stimulating and
elegantly stated polemic’ but that his historical picture ‘stands an exaggeration
that sometimes becomes wild’. Blaut (1993) had earlier argued that the argument
attributing all technological dynamism after 1500 as wholly internal to the West
is ‘ultimately a coloniser’s model of the world in that it legitimises colonialism
and domination by the inventive to teach the non-inventive’. In his exhaustive
efforts to demonstrate that all modern technologies in c.1700 had been devel-
oped in the East and were assimilated by the West, Hobson perpetuates this error
in another guise. His efforts to demonstrate diffusion are generally tenuous and
based on assertions without substantive supporting evidence. For example:
No-one knows where the origins of the heavy plough lay. It is often assumed
that it was the Slavs who first developed the plough around 568 but it
reached them from an unknown probably eastern source.The technology of the European military revolution was derived from the
East and diffused across to the West through a long chain of transmissions.It is striking that Tull’s basic principles of the seed-drill, outlined in his book
Horse-Hoeing Husbandry(1733) were almost a word for word reproduc-
tion of those laid out in the original Chinese manuals dating back to the 3rd
century BCE.Almost all of these aspects of the Italian machines resembled the earlier
Chinese models down to the time when Lombe visited Italy.The great advantage of first England then the rest of the West lay in an abil-
ity to utilize inventions successfully whatever their origins. This could perhaps
be due to a mixture of openness and culture (discussed in more detail in
Chapters 12 and 13). This distinction has long been a crucial concept in tales
of growth and development. This claim will not come as a surprise to anyone
familiar with the story of rapid growth of South Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s
or Thailand and Malaysia in the 1970s or China in the 1980s. These growth
stories were based on utilizing innovation and technology from elsewhere to
manufacture cheap exports. The key difference between the West on the one
hand and China, India and the Islamic countries on the other, whether around
1500 or around 1750, is that only in the West did learning generate a self-
sustaining process that brought about modern industrialization and economic
growth. An example is that of iron and steel. In both these industries India was
a technological leader until at least the eighteenth century with 10,000
furnaces producing the famous Wootz steel which was exported to Persia
(Frank,1998). Steel was used to produce swords and other luxury products for
the nobility but never achieved growth through mass-market expansion,
continuous technological change and reduced costs. In iron manufacture the
162 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth